Latest revision as of 11:25, 24 August 2007

This page serves as a historical record of the fun that was had at AngloHaskell 2007. You have now missed AngloHaskell 2007.

AngloHaskell 2007 is taking place on the 10th of August at MSR Cambridge, with further activities on the 11th. It's free, and everyone is invited! Simply add your name to the wiki and we'll see you there :-)

If you do take a taxi and the driver doesn't know where it is, tell him or her to drive down Madingley Road until you reach the West Cambridge site, J J Thomson Avenue. The Computer Laboratory (next door) has marginally better instructions.

The fastest way to MSR (on foot and public transport) from the station is to cut through to Trumpington Road via Bateman Street (don't follow the driving directions!), and take the Citi 4 or Uni 4. There's a bus stop just across the road from Bateman Street.

To get to the city centre by bus, take the Citi 1 or Citi 3. Do ask to make sure they're going in the right direction though! There are also a number of clearly marked shuttle busses between the centre and station running during the day every 10 minutes or so.

To walk to the centre (20 minutes not carrying luggage), go straight down the road facing you when you come out of the station, bear right when the road ends at some traffic lights / a WW1 memorial / the botanic gardens, and keep walking straight (Hills Road / Regent St / St Andrews St) for quite a while until you reach a pedestrianised bit, at which point you are in the centre.

From the city centre to MSR, you can catch the number 77 Madingley Road Park and Ride which goes from bus stop M on Emma St. (Or find your way to Pembroke or Silver Street, and catch the Citi 4 / Uni 4 from there.) (Note that the 77 doesn't stop by MSR any more, it goes to the park and ride from which you have to walk back, 10-15 mins. This caught me out the other day --SimonM).

Sebastian Sylvan - interested. It depends on the talks. I'm sure all the talks listed so far will be interesting, but if we can get one or two of the "big names" to give a talk, then it's a surefire guarantee that it'll be worth coming for, and then other talks would be icing on the cake! Personally I'm very interested in the concurrency/parallelism stuff that's going on currently (so if anyone reading this has something to say on that, sign up!). Also, might be worhtwhile to synchronise it with a bank holiday so people don't have to take a day off?

Lennart Augustsson - I can probably make August 10-11, otherwise early September.

Philippa will be arriving at MSR around 10am, with tea, coffee and biscuits available from 10:30am. There'll be a sandwich lunch available (time to be confirmed around the talks) and another coffee etc break sometime between 3 and 4. We'll also end with an 'open' session in which people can grab a whiteboard and talk for 10-15 minutes on whatever takes their fancy - see below!

Volunteers please! Last year we had a largely more practical set of talks than you might find at Fun in the Afternoon or an academic event. This was a good thing, and some of the best talks were from people who were far from considering themselves as experts, so feel free to tell us about your experiences.

Indexed type families, aka "type functions", can express all that functional dependencies do, but in a much nicer way. Furthermore they play nice with GADTs etc. I'll describe the idea, and sketch the main technical challenge for type checking.

In Haskell there is sometimes a tension between declarative high-level programs, and high-performance programs. This talk discusses a whole-program optimisation for Haskell, which can transform a high-level program into a very low-level performance orientated one.

Pure-data (Pd) is a real-time graphical programming environment for multimedia processing. Pd has a stateful objects and message passing paradigm, and additional object classes can be written in C (Pd native), C++, Python, Scheme, Ruby, and possibly others (through extra plugins). This talk will be about the trials and tribulations of adding Haskell support to Pure-data.

Asperger's is an oft-controversial condition on the autistic spectrum, sometimes (mis)described as 'geek syndrome'. Philippa talks about how the condition affects her, how and why Haskell works for her as a programming language and how the Haskell community has responded to her.

Everyone knows that pure programs are not only easier to understand, but easier to reason about - but is a program based totally around state monads and IORef still pure? Does it matter? I'll demonstrate a prototype compiler that does an effect inference on Haskell-like code which allows laziness and program transformation style optimisations in the prescence of destructive update and other side effects.

View patterns are a simple and convenient way of reconciling pattern-matching and type abstraction. I will describe our design for view patterns and its implementation in GHC.

You? - Functional Grit

Small and perhaps dirty talks that may nevertheless grow into functional pearls. An open session - we'll let volunteers take the stage and a whiteboard for 5-15 minutes each to talk about whatever they fancy (though preferably programming-related!)

I suggest we go to The Regal for brunch on Saturday to kick off with. That's the Wetherspoons from last year. After that, punting again if it's not raining too much? Any suggestions for if it's wet?

I'd like it if we can eat at a restaurant before finding a pub for the evening on friday. Borrowing Fun in the Afternoon's post-talks curry works if nobody's got any other suggestions - PhilippaCowderoy

Once again, MSR is willling to provide wireless internet to everyone who gives their name and email address (and where appropriate, company/institution name) - this time by Friday the 3rd of August. Feel free to add your details even if you're not sure you're coming!

This isn't really a major point, but: it seems to me that keeping about the pages used to organise previous events is a good idea as things go on, and that this page should be used both to link to the archives and contain the current discussion. Anyone take issue with this?